"But you don't believe it, do you?"
The surprise must have been evident in her face. Mrs. Voorsanger nodded. "I got some of it, and Ed too. Sensitive to mood. But it don't take a psychic to know that's just nonsense. Any halfway intelligent person could see that."
"Her problems . . . there's a good possibility that whatever's wrong is genetic. That's why we're here."
"You want to see her mother."
Jess nodded. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble. I wouldn't disturb her, Mrs. Voorsanger, and it might mean the difference for Sarah."
Tears trembled in the old woman's eyes and white flecks dotted the corners of her mouth. A silence filled the room. "It's been hard with her. But what she has ... it isn't hurtful. It isn't evil."
"I don't believe it is."
Mrs. Voorsanger shrugged. "Go on up, then. We'll wait for you here. You won't be gone long."
***
The hallway was dim and full of clutter, crumbling yellow newspapers and magazines in stacks along the walls. A set of stairs led up into gloom. The air smelled of mice, and damp things left too long without sunlight.
Jess went up the steps slowly, hearing the creak of old wood, and stopped at the first doorway, looking into a small, square room with a four-poster bed, and a floor dipping to the middle and worn white with age. She stepped carefully, half afraid the boards would give under her weight and send her tumbling through.
She paused for a moment just inside the door, listening. Something seemed to buzz softly, like voices speaking too far away to make anything out.
Annie Voorsanger sat in a rocking chair by a large, curtained window. She was bone-thin and her black hair was pulled tightly back and held with elastic. Wiry strands had escaped their bonds and stuck out around the patches of gray at her temples. As hard as it was to believe looking at her, Jess thought, she must have been barely thirty years old.
Annie's clothes were loose-fitting and made of a stretchy fabric, the kind that pulls on easily. She stared unblinking at the curtains, as if focused on something out of sight beyond the glass. Her face was absent, as if she were a puppet that had been tucked away between performances.
Standing there in the wings, Jess tried to piece things together. A silver cross on the wall, the hundreds of figurines. Simple, God-fearing folk. They had been given a daughter who was not whole, a terrible burden to carry. They had asked God to protect her, to give her a decent life even if she couldn't live alone, even if she couldn't tie her own shoes.
But it had gotten even worse with Annie's pregnancy. There would be another child to watch over. God had not listened. Or He had not been strong enough. Was it any wonder Mrs. Voorsanger had seen Sarah as the child of the devil? It all made terrible, perfect sense.
Then why suddenly couldn't she keep her hands from shaking or get her heart to slow down?
Easy now, girl. Those are old wives' tales, witches and demon familiars.
Jess stepped closer and said clearly and firmly, "Ms. Voorsanger? Annie?"
She might have been talking to the air. Sarah's mother was in a place very far from here.
Jess could see something of Sarah in her broad forehead, angular features, and narrow shoulders, in the way she rocked back and forth. There was an intensity to her features made all the more apparent by the slackness of the facial muscles. Annie might have been pretty once. But the life that was supposed to live here was absent.
Jess stepped closer still. The curtains drifted slightly on an unseen draft from the closed window, as below her feet the furnace kicked on.
The room seemed to tick the way a hot engine ticked in silence.
Jess willed herself to be still. "Annie? Annie Voorsanger?"
Nothing. The woman might have been wax. Jess reached out to brush a strand of hair away from her forehead, then thought better of it. "I've come to talk about your daughter."
A blink. The woman's eyes were blank walls of glass. "Do you remember her, Annie? Do you remember Sarah?"
A finger twitched. Movement in the throat; was there life here after all? "I don't want to upset you, Annie. I just wanted to talk for a minute. I've been seeing Sarah back in Boston. She's doing real good. I thought you might want to know. We're taking good care of her."
She wondered if this was cruel, if Annie felt any maternal instinct. If it were her, would she want to know any of this? Jess decided that she would.
"Sarah's been coming along lately. I'm going to make sure she gets all the care she needs, Annie. If you can hear me, I'm going to make sure your daughter's given every chance. She's ten now, she looks like you too. A pretty little girl. Can you hear me, Annie? Do you want me to tell you anything else?"
Nothing-And suddenly the woman's head was turning, her mouth opening in a silent, wide black O that seemed to grow larger and larger. A screech began low in her throat and grew into a rusty, cracked wail, rising in pitch like the tortured sounds of cats in moonlight. It was an alien voice, one that did not belong here in the middle of a farmhouse bedroom.
The sound came from both outside and within her head. Disoriented, Jess reached out as if to touch her, drew her hand back in shock at the waves of cold air washing across the dusty space.
Annie's eyes jumped and rolled as the sound grew to fill the little room, a mindless howl of protest as her fingers plucked at something only she could see, as she rose out of her chair, and Jess stumbled backward as if pushed by a monstrous, unseen hand.
--11--
They did not speak until the car was back on the asphalt road, headed into Gilbertsville. They had left Mrs. Voorsanger tending to her daughter, Annie's screams slowly quieting as her mother spoke softly, gently in her ear. It had been nothing but a reflex, a simple release of tension, or at least that was what Jess kept telling herself; it had probably been building for a long time.
But she couldn't keep the chills from running up and down her spine, or the quivers from her muscles. It was almost as if she had experienced Annie's fear, had been inside the woman's mind.
According to her mother, that scream was the first sound that Annie Voorsanger had uttered in almost three years.
"So what do you think?"
"I don't know," Jess said. She did not want to look away from the road, but finally she did.
Shelley sat up straight in the passenger seat and was looking at her with the calm and considered gaze of a doctor. "Give me an opinion."
"She's obviously disturbed. Beyond that--she'd need to be examined more fully."
"You can see how it was," Shelley said. There was a gleam in her eyes that hadn't been there before. "Sarah was alone with them and I wanted to get her out as fast as I could. They agreed to give me full legal responsibility and the state signed the paperwork. If she ever got to the point of leaving my care I would contact them."
"Would you have?"
"I doubt it."
Take her, I told you, Mrs. Voorsanger had said, turning to Shelley as they left, as her daughter's screams had finally turned to low moans. You remember. Care for our Sarah, I said. But never forget what she is.
And what was that?
A child with the power of the devil in her hands.
"You think they're all insane?"
"I didn't say that. If there's one thing I've learned," Shelley said, seeming to choose her words carefully, "it's that the mind is capable of amazing feats. But what they're asking us to consider here is in the realm of parapsychology. Pseudoscience. You understand what I'm saying."
Something that was not logically possible, according to all the laws of physics. A child of the devil? Certainly not. That went far beyond anything she was willing to believe. A lapsed Catholic, she was not a particularly religious woman. Only in times of great stress had her mind searched for belief in a higher power, and afterward she always felt slightly embarrassed, a little childish, as if someone might have seen what she had been thinking and thought less of her for it.